HIROHITO'S WAR - SYNOPSIS

Hirohito's War is the most comprehensive
available narrative of the Pacific War. and the
first single-volume history on the subject produced
for thirty years.

Francis Pike's fast-paced story argues that the origins
of the Pacific War lie in the implosion of Chinese
power and China's descent to a region picked over
for advantage by Japan and the West. He suggests
that the start date for the Second World War should
be considered the Marco Polo Bridge Incident,
which escalated into a full-scale war between
China and Japan in 1937. Hirohito’s War traces the
path to war involving the complex interplay of
domestic and foreign politics in America, Japan.
Germany, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union.

The narrative explains the rise of Japan’s imperial
ambitions through the adoption by its ruling elites
of Darwinian racial philosophies. Hirohito’s War also
argues that America and Great Britain's failure to
enforce the international rule-based ‘Pax Anglo-
Saxon’ established at Versailles and the Washington
Conference was a major cause of the Pacific War.
Ultimately America, militarily weakened by two
decades of isolationism, but nevertheless seeking to
protect its own geopolitical interests, provoked Japan
to war by the imposition of an oil embargo.

In addition to geopolitical analysis. Hirohito’s War
is structured to give blow-by-blow accounts of
every major campaign of the war with a particular
emphasis on strategy, topography, logistics and
technology. The gruesome quality of the war,
fought in some of the planet’s most hostile terrains,
is not forgotten. The combatants of both sides are
extensively quoted to provide human color to the
narrative drama.

Hirohito’s War debunks the Pearl Harbor conspiracy
theories, highlights General MacArthur’s chicanery
and argues that Emperor Hirohito, the embodiment
of Japan’s imperialism, should have been charged
as a war criminal. Francis Pike also explains Chiang
Kai-Shek's seeming reluctance to fight, the historical
expunction of Australia's major contribution to the
Pacific War, the US Navy’s torpedo scandal, and the
moral issues of the firebombing of Japan and the
nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.